Refutation and Desire: European Perceptions of Shamanism in the Late Eighteenth Century*

Abstract

The article discusses learned debates that evolved at the end of the eighteenth century in Europe about the interpretation of shamanism. Intellectuals, philosophers, and enlightened monarchs engaged in controversies about shamanism that were clearly linked to Enlightenment ideals of rationality and religious critique. The article addresses the ambivalence of ‘refutation and desire’ in French, German, and Russian responses to shamanism, with special attention to the French Encyclopedists, Johann Gottfried Herder, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Catherine the Great. The controversies reveal the intrinsic tension of the European project of ‘modernity’: what was discussed as ‘shamanism,’ ultimately turned out to be the result of European self-reflection.

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“…In the 1960s and 70s, certain revolutionary qualities of the "counterculture" of postindustrial societies, the practice of "neoshamanism" gained currency offering, in contrast to institutionalised Christian-based religions and political orders, "alternative spiritualities" that were informed by the 1960s and 70s psychedelic culture, the human potential movement, environmentalism, and within these threads, various anthropological and academic figures (Atkinson 1992:322;Znamenski 2007:233;Stuckrad 2012). As noted above, neoshamanism in the 1960s counterculture involved types of oppositional politics and critical perspectives on "the system" or common conditions of Western society and religious institutions (Atkinson 1992).…”